The Hanging Judge (11 page)

“Uh-huh. Did you know Delgado?” He looked up at Hudson and back down at his pad.

“Oh yeah. Pissant jumped me with two other punks last time I was in here. One of them had a shank.” He held up his arm with the scar. “They got me real good.” Moon stared off into space, his jaw muscles twitching as he gritted his teeth. “There was a time, you know? Not too long ago. When I would have given a lot just to watch that little motherfucker die, slow and nasty.”

“Now?”

“It’s just a big waste,” Hudson said softly. “Waste of him. Waste of me.”

“Any more questions?” Redpath asked. “We’ve only got a few minutes today, and I want to make some other stops. They need the room.”

“How’d somebody like you kill anybody? You mean, like, flying airplanes in Vietnam or some shit?”

“Please,” Redpath said with a snort. “Take a look at me, Moon!” Bill got up abruptly and walked over to a table against the wall that held a plastic jug of water and a stack of paper cups. “I’m a little old for Vietnam. Ever hear of Korea?” He was pouring the water, spilling a little.

He took a sip and continued. “I was a teenage corporal in a heavy weapons platoon, toting a .30 caliber machine gun. Can’t say I’m proud of myself.” He began filling a second cup, more carefully now, and spoke looking down at the table. “Caught them with the sun in their eyes. Most of those Chinamen weren’t even shaving yet. They looked like girls.” He nodded over at Hudson. “You want some water?”

He returned to his chair, sat down heavily, and pushed a cup across the table toward Hudson. “As Justice Holmes said, no man shot below the rib cage dies a hero’s death.”

Redpath’s voice rose to drown out the background shouting, which had started again louder than ever, accompanied by a metallic clang. The noise stopped abruptly, making his question a little too loud. “Is it all right if we get down to business now?”

Redpath pulled his copy of the indictment out and flipped to the first count, reminding himself of the date of the incident. It would not be a bad place to start. He pressed his liver-spotted hands onto the tabletop to keep them from trembling. Korea. It never left him.

“Okay.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Sandra says you were home with her the morning Delgado was shot. Is that true? Or is she just playing the dutiful wife?”

Hudson ignored the question. “With me, it was April 2008. Skinny little Los Solidos warlord named Breeze in the White Castle parking lot. With my Glock. Old Breeze just looked surprised. Dropped his cheeseburger and sat down in the pricker bushes.” Hudson shifted in the metal chair, making it squeak faintly. “Waste of him, waste of me.”

“Yes,” Redpath said quietly. “A complete waste.”

Moon looked at the table and nodded to himself. “Now it comes around.”

They each drank their water. Moon finished, crumpled his cup and, in one agile movement, tossed it neatly into the small wastebasket in the corner of the room.

“Moon, we need to get started. Were you and Sandra …”

“Let me ask you another question, Bill. Sorry. Why are they bringing this in federal court? What’s up with that? Is it just because of the, you know, because of capital punishment?”

“Let’s not call it that, okay?” Redpath finished his water, crumpled the paper cup, and eyed the wastebasket. As Moon watched, he lobbed the ball of paper; it hit the wall and bounced in. Moon raised his eyebrows and nodded slightly. It was a beginning.

“ ‘Capital punishment’ makes it sound like something in a philosophy book. I call it the death penalty, because that’s what it is. The government wants to strap you down on a wagon, wheel you into a little room, and have a doctor stick a needle in you to stop your heart. Nothing fancy.”

“Okay,” Hudson said. His finger moved slowly back and forth along the table’s scar.

“So, yeah,” Redpath said. “The first reason you’re in federal court is our government wants to kill you. God only knows why they picked this case. People say we’ve got a U.S. attorney, this Hogan character, who wants first prize in the ‘Tough Guy’ category, which is a laugh since I hear he picked a Puerto Rican assistant to try the case, a woman, to be sure he’ll have cover if you get off.”

Hudson shook his head. “Shit.” Then he lifted his chin at Redpath. “You ever done a case like this before?”

“This is my fourth.”

“How’ve you made out?”

“One not guilty. One guilty but with life imprisonment. One I lost.”

“Your guy got stuck?”

“Right. I was there when it happened.” Redpath looked down at the backs of his hands. His fingers danced, and he added, “Lost a very fine marriage, too.”

“How’d he go down?”

“Let’s talk about that later,” Redpath said. “The second reason you’re in federal court is a little more subtle. Even if they lose on the death penalty, you could still get life on the RICO charge for racketeering.”

“Racketeering? Who do they think I am, some Mafia guy?”

“Being in a gang can be enough.”

“I’m done with gangs, man. Been done for years now.”

“Even if they can prove you did some kind of deal with them, it’s probably enough. But, let’s say the jury acquits you on the RICO count? They still have you on the drug charges, possession of marijuana and cocaine with intent. In federal court, they can hit you a lot harder for those, no matter what happens with the murders.”

“That wasn’t even my stuff,” Hudson said, shrugging. “Don’t even know how it got there.”

“Really.”

“And besides, four or five halfs, right? That’s what they said? And maybe a couple eight balls of coke? How much can I get for that?”

“It would be your third strike. That makes you a career offender. And under the sentencing guidelines, you’re looking at a range of something like twenty, thirty years to life just for the drugs.”

“That’s got to be bullshit,” Hudson said, leaning back in the chair and shaking his head. “Got to be. If the jury convicts me for Delgado and that nurse, but they don’t decide to, you know. Then I get life, right?”

“Life without possibility of parole. Mandatory.”

“But I could get almost the same thing for four, five baggies of pot and a couple tablespoons of blow? Come on. That’s got to be a joke.”

“It’s a joke, all right. But it’s not all that funny.”

Hudson stared at his lawyer, lips slightly parted, and Redpath saw the light dying behind his eyes. Over Hudson’s shoulder, a guard’s face appeared. The guard held his wristwatch up, tapped it, and vanished.

Hudson said, “Some old granddad in here told me what you just said, but I didn’t believe him. I figured he was stuffing me.”

“Believe it.”

Hudson turned to the side and began scrubbing his forehead with the tips of his fingers, sucking air in through his nose to absorb the sting.

“So, Sandy,” Hudson said to himself. “And Grace. That book is closed.”

Redpath decided to give Moon some space and wandered over for a cup of water he didn’t need. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world that they were kicking him out so soon. This might be plenty for the first day.

He returned with two cups of water, set one in front of Moon and began sipping his.

“The worst thing I could do, Moon, is offer false hope. So I’m not going to kid you. You’re so deep in the shadow of the eight ball right now, you have moss growing on your north side. But I want to tell you this, before we break up.”

“Okay.” Moon had drifted off again, back to where things didn’t matter.

“I think they botched the search of your apartment. Seems they had a valid arrest warrant, but not a proper search warrant. If we had a judge with some backbone, we could get the drugs thrown out. But we’re stuck with this new guy Norcross, and that could make things a whole lot harder.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s only been on the bench a couple of years, he never tried a serious criminal case as a lawyer, and the easiest thing for him to do is whatever the government wants.”

There was a sharp tap on the window.

“I have to go now. You need to have a little chat with Sandy. I’ll call this Attorney Goodman and see if he’ll let me talk to his boy Rivera. Goodman’s another piece of work.”

Hudson nodded, saying nothing.

Before they left, they took turns tossing their crumpled cups at the wastebasket. Hudson let Redpath go first. This time, they both missed.

“Bad sign,” Redpath said, and he got a grim smile from his client.

13

“
If I had a dinosaur,” Frank crooned as he tapped away at his computer, “just think where we could go. All the way to Grandma’s house, to play her pee-ann-oh!”

The days were getting shorter. Although it was barely six p.m., it was almost dark outside the federal courthouse. With the trial in
United States v. Hudson
looming, Frank and Eva were working late to keep the session current on all its other cases.

“Frank, for the love of mercy,” Eva yelled from her office. “Sing anything else.”

Frank stopped typing and stared at the wall for a few seconds. Then his voice resumed, “Baby beluga in the deep blue sea—you swim so wild and you swim so free. Sky above and the sea below, just a little white whale on the …”

“Oi!”

Eva stood in Frank’s doorway yanking fat bunches of dark curly hair out from both sides of her head.

“I love you, Frank, I love you deeply, but you’ve been lobotomized by fatherhood.”

Frank smiled up at her and took a bite of walnut brownie. “Did I tell you what Brady did last night?” he asked. “He was sitting on the potty …”

“I can’t take this.” Eva disappeared with a groan. Her door closed sharply, and Frank put down the pastry and hauled himself up with a worried expression. He really liked Eva. They’d taken to looking after each other. She bugged him to get exercise and had even begun lending him her hand weights so he could do workouts at his desk. He gave her advice on how to handle Norcross when he was in one of his increasingly frequent stressed-out moods. She and her partner, Bonnie, babysat Brady, whose vocabulary now included
schlep
and
schmuck,
which he delivered with impressive amounts of spit.

“I was kidding,” he said in a wheedling tone. “Come on!” Eva’s office door opened a crack, and her eyes peeped up at him through her oversize glasses.

“No more Raffi songs during work hours,” she said.

“Okay, deal,” he said. “And I’ll even do the horrible pressure valve memo.”

Eva opened the door all the way and pointed at a stack of papers. “I already did it, last weekend. His Honor’s instinct was right. The patent applicant deliberately concealed prior art. Plaintiff’s toast.” The file in this intellectual property litigation comprised four three-foot piles; they’d both been dreading it.

“God, Eva, you must have been here all weekend! The airplane engine industry will never be the same. C is for champ.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Bonnie was at nonstop meetings.” She sighed and looked with dejection at her desk. “Do you have a minute? I’ve got a big problem.” Standing on tiptoes, she put her arm around his shoulder. “I need to talk to my bud.”

Frank’s eyes widened. “Let’s use the big guy’s office!”

“Are we allowed in there?”

“Who cares?” Frank hurried back to his desk. “I’ll bring the goodies.”

They crossed the library and Lucille’s reception area, crept down the short hallway past the supply room where the printer and photocopier were murmuring, and peered into Norcross’s inner sanctum, with its book-lined walls and leather furniture.

Eva hesitated in the doorway. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies. It always looks like he just got it back from the cleaners.” As they entered, she asked, “Did you see this week’s computer quote?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who was Jeremiah?

“Hebrew prophet.”

Eva gave Frank a look. “I know that. But why was Jeremiah a bullfrog?”

“It’s a line from a Boomer song about feeling happy. You can take the couch.” He set his plate of brownies on the coffee table and eased into a wingback. “Watch out for crumbs.”

A city bus five floors down noisily shifted gears and whined around the Jersey barriers that now ringed the courthouse and blocked half the street. Security had been stepped up since the Hudson indictment. Some routine pretrial rulings had not been received well by the blogs, and Frank had gotten a scrawled note that read: “FYI: Hudson flies; Norcross dies. Start looking for a new job.” The judge said it was like several he’d already turned over to the marshals. Just the usual kooks.

Eva sat on the edge of the sofa and set her elbows on her knees, propping her chin on her hands. She glanced quickly at Frank and looked away, going all fidgety. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

“What is it?” Frank asked. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Bonnie thinks I should quit.”

“Quit what?” Frank swallowed the last bite of his brownie.

“Quit this job.”

“Get out!” Frank jerked himself up, sweeping the plate off the coffee table with his foot and launching a volley of brownies across the burgundy carpeting.

Eva spoke quickly, not looking at Frank.

“She thinks it’s wrong to work in a court that might order someone’s execution. She doesn’t believe in capital punishment. Yesterday …” Eva nodded down toward the plaza and sighed. “Yesterday she was out there with the protesters.”

“I hope she had a helmet on. One of them got hit by a rock.”

Eva’s chin bobbed, counting the phrases out as though she had memorized them. “She thinks I should make a statement. She thinks if people who work in the courts refuse to have anything to do with the death penalty, our actions might help bring an end to it.”

“God,” Frank repeated, shaking his head. “God, God, God.”

“I can’t sleep. I feel like crap,” Eva said miserably.

“I can’t do this by myself!” Frank shoved himself out of the chair and began duck walking around the coffee table picking the brownies up off the carpet. “I know I’m being a selfish so-and-so, but I can’t do this all alone.”

“You’d manage.” Eva was staring straight ahead, blinking.

“No, I wouldn’t!” Two more brownies slid off the plate; he retrieved them, making a little pyramid, and eased the assemblage back onto the table. “Let’s face it, I’d be totally screwed without you.” He returned to his chair and leaned back, shaking his head. “They couldn’t even get a fourth-rate fill-in for you this time of year. But that’s not the point.”